Guide to Progressive News & Politics on the Web

[Paul Evans]

Guide to Progressive
News and Politics on the Web

By Paul Earl Evans

(As seen on MyBarackObama.com and www.dailykos.com)


Here we will explore where to look on the web for political content and news content which have a progressive flavor. Since this is an introductory article, we will not be covering RSS feeds, newsgroups or environmental websites, although you can certainly find out a lot about the environment at some of the websites mentioned.

Let’s start with AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/. This is one of the largest, most highly regarded progressive websites, with truthful news, columnists, videos and blogs. Sign up for email newsletters on the topics which are of interest; you can do that with almost all of the websites listed here. There are many “threads” of discussions going on at any given time over quite a few of the articles. You can email or print anything and pages print with print large enough to read, even with Internet Explorer (6 or 7). One of the finest blogs in existence for us progressives and for anyone concerned with the truth is Daily Kos, http://www.dailykos.com/, which is hosted by one Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. It gets a hefty traffic of a half a million readers per day. He and his contributors really tell the truth without embellishment, and this website can be counted on to separate the chaff from the wheat. Be sure you check out the "diaries". As with many of these websites, you need to register with your email, often providing a username and almost always a password, for full-featured access. Another great one is Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/, the non-profit news and views website with a couple of hundred links to news and blog websites and columnists. I must be an old curmudgeon; I liked their old page format better.....but it's absolutely one of the best liberal web sites out there.

If you want a good dose of the real left, try http://www.truthout.org/, which has hundreds of news stories and turns up a LOT of dirt on the Administration. I understand America Online has restricted their users on this one.

Now, about "the truth." There are a few websites which make it their business to check the media, politicians and candidates' statements and tell YOU, the (news) "consumer" just what is true and what is false, and to what degree. Here are a couple of the best: http://www.factcheck.org/ (sign up for the email newsletters from this one) and from down in St. Petersburg, Florida (yes, Florida), http://www.politifact.com/. You won't always see what you want. If you are a Clinton OR (even) an Obama supporter you may find a few lies or exaggerations exposed, and if you are any kind of a progressive, you may dislike finding some (only a few) of the claims made against McCain debunked. But you will always get the truth from these two websites.

One of the best progressive magazines is The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/, and if you are of an intellectual bent you will like Harper's, http://www.harpers.org/, which magazine has been around since 1850. Both of these are also print magazines, and the websites want you to subscribe but you can still read them online for free. One of my very favorite places to stop by is Talking Points Memo, http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/, where you have your own profile and blog. Be sure you read the news and check out such features as Muckraker, Election Central, the Café, and by all means read "The Horse's Mouth." If you care about the "spinning" of the news and corporate control over content, be sure to check out Media Matters for America, http://mediamatters.org/index.

Also check out The Nation Institute, http://www.nationinstitute.org/, which is a very impressive website where you can learn a lot. A little more arcane is The Rockridge Institute, http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/, which is about "framing" the debate in American society from the progressive point of view. The Republicans were framing the debate before progressives knew what framing was!!

Let me take a moment to relate something I referenced at FactCheck.org. Washington lawmakers are notoriously influenced by lobbyists, so I want to show how that pertains to the upcoming Presidential election. Lobbying is a regulated profession; you have to be registered to be an active lobbyist. Let's look at Obama and Clinton, versus the leading Republican candidate, John McCain, in terms of the number of lobbyists working on the candidates' campaign staffs. There are 59 registered lobbyists working on McCain's staff, 20 for Hillary Clinton, and ten who were formerly registered as lobbyists working on Barack Obama's campaign staff (Public Citizen, January 29, 2008). John Edwards had three “bundlers” (fundraisers) working on his campaign who were ex-lobbyists. You can find Public Citizen (founded by Ralph Nader) at http://action.citizen.org/. Be sure and check the Press Room for current stories. The preceding should give you an idea of just who -- and how much -- each candidate is "influenced" by corporations, but it is this plus the donations themselves which tell the full story. It is very useful and convenient to have the two resources, www.factcheck.org, and www.politifact.com (which is a page of the St. Petersburg Times), at one's fingertips to check the facts out and have the truth at hand.

Here are some more serious, very good progressive blogs and websites. You may ask, if these blogs are just online diaries, what can I really learn from them? Ah, grasshopper, you are showing your online naiveté. A blog can be just as much a serious vehicle as The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com) is as a newspaper and (conventional) website. It's just that ANY website which takes the form of a dated series of communications, usually with an archive, and with the newest entry at the top is a blog, or weblog, by definition. A great blog you will want to check out is The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com, and it's always a good idea to stop by Fire Dog Lake, http://firedoglake.com/. If you want to check out the people who absolutely infuriate conservatives in the know, go to MoveOn.org, http://www.moveon.org/. Seventy percent of the 3.2 million members of MoveOn.org who voted, asked the site to publically back Barack Obama, and they are actively campaigning for him as well as other progressive candidates. This is also the site for people who want to get involved and put their name and email on petitions; just click the "Campaigns" button at the top.

A great resource is The American Prospect, http://www.prospect.org/, whose slogan is “liberal intelligence.” There is a definite tie-in here with liberal Judaism. A really good progressive “commentary and analysis on politics in America” is The Carpetbagger Report, http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/. There is a LOT of good analysis there and the topics are very current from the news. When you load any of Taegan Goddard’s stories on the “Political Wire” on the left of the screen, be sure to check out the “Breaking News” stories from the button at the top. The New Republic, http://www.tnr.com/, is another essential resource which must not be missed.

Perhaps you’d like to see speeches by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama (or be infuriated by those of Bush and Cheney). Google’s video website YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/, has free registration, after which you can search many millions of videos, make comments, save the ones you like or download them in Real Player format, and share links to them. A search for “Barack Obama” on Google video, http://video.google.com/, yielded about 43,100 results, but the links to the most relevant videos are on the results page provided, simply from a search on YouTube. (Google owns YouTube and there are more comprehensive search results on Google than you get on YouTube; however most of the results of the search are YouTube videos with the links provided.)

If you feel so inclined and are among those who are getting up in years, try AARP, the American Association of Retired People, http://www.aarp.org/. Be sure to visit the magazine, http://www.aarpmagazine.org/, and especially the Bulletin, http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/. You can join for a modest fee if you are 50 or older. AARP has been extremely successful at lobbying Congress about social programs. Back at the beginning of 2006 when the Bush administration was trying very hard to privatize Social Security, AARP ran a singularly effective campaign which squashed this attempt. Another great website to visit is http://www.now.org, for the National Organization of Women. There is a lot of real news and factual information to be found here. They supported Hillary Clinton very strongly.

Another group the Bush administration hates is the American Friends Service Committee. That’s right, the social arm of the Quakers. You can find them and join their efforts for peace and relief at http://www.afsc.org/. Apparently being against the war in Iraq is enough to make you an enemy of the administration even if you are a notably Christian group! Ah, but not the “right sort” of Christian. All conservatives reserve a special venom for the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, http://www.aclu.org/. When you’ve joined the ACLU, you’ve reached a certain level of status in the progressive movement. I will only note that this group defends the civil rights of everyone, including conservatives. Related is TalkLeft, http://www.talkleft.com/, which is about the politics of crime and injustice.

The New York Times infuriated its online readership when it began charging for full access a couple of years ago; the current day’s news is still free. The Washington Post is still completely free; you will find it at http://www.washingtonpost.com/.

Although you will not find too much news there with a progressive slant, there is good general news coverage at Yahoo news, http://news.yahoo.com/. It's certainly not a progressive source per se, but they do a pretty good job with the news. In other words it a resource to check out the “mainstream” news. The progressive coverage is at the bottom of the page. Yahoo, fighting off a $44.6 billion plus takeover attempt by Microsoft, is in talks with the media giant Rupert Murdoch (see http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/07/b122948.html). If Yahoo goes that route, you can expect any remaining evenhandedness in their news coverage to go out the window. The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.org/, referenced above, is the website of a think tank that has, besides the homepage, sections on national security, domestic and economy, media and culture, and others.

If you just want just summary of the news, with links to the full articles, try the Progressive Blog Digest, http://pbd.blogspot.com/. Recently it has been the number one website listed in the search results for "progressive blogs" from Google; these are really good, in depth stories (at the links), with real research involved in digging them out of the media by one Nicholas Burbules, the owner. There is good news coverage and there are some great blogs at Mother Jones News, http://www.motherjones.com/. Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek called OxBlog, http://oxblog.blogspot.com/, "a great read," and you should also check out Buzzflash, which is a whole family of websites. Try http://www.buzzflash.com/ and http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/. A favorite of mine here is Buzzflash.com’s GOP Hypocrite of the Week, http://www.gophypocrites.com/index.php.

Finally, let me conclude this survey of the progressive scene with Tom Paine's, "common sense," which can be found at http://www.tompaine.com/. It's a gritty, well thought out website which should not be passed up. Thomas Paine, more than any other thinker, motivated citizens of the British colonies in America to rebel in the American Revolutionary War. A pamphlet called Common Sense was perhaps most influential. One of his sayings was, “When the government fears the people, you have liberty. When the people fear the government, you have tyranny.”